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What’s On Friday

9 P.M. (13) RIGOLETTO Michael Mayer, who won a Tony Award for directing “Spring Awakening,” made his Metropolitan Opera debut with this Verdi work, in a new production known as “the Rat Pack ‘Rigoletto,’ ” which moved events from a decadent 16th-century Italian court to the Las Vegas strip around 1960. The Polish tenor Piotr Beczala is the Duke, here a Sinatra-like playboy whose entourage includes the world-weary comedian Rigoletto, sung by the Serbian baritone Zeljko Lucic. The German soprano Diana Damrau, above with Mr. Lucic, plays the innocent Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter and the victim of the predatory Duke. The Italian Michele Mariotti leads the ensemble in what Anthony Tommasini, writing in The New York Times, called “an excellent outing for this rising conductor.” Mr. Tommasini also noted that Mr. Mayer “had modeled Rigoletto on aggressive comics like Don Rickles, who could crack up Sinatra.” But “the vagueness of the concept undermines Mr. Lucic’s otherwise affecting performance,” he added, writing “the production was a frustrating mix of inventive and half-baked thinking.”

9 A.M. (Showtime) BILLY ELLIOT (2000) An 11-year-old boy (Jamie Bell) in a coal-mining town in northern England dreams of becoming a ballet dancer — to the horror of his father (Gary Lewis) — and is pushed to audition for the Royal Ballet School by his secret dance teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters, above with Mr. Bell). “As in so many British movies, class antagonism permeates ‘Billy Elliot’ like coal soot in the air,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times. “But it’s never a simple matter, and the climactic journey to London, in which Billy and his father are interviewed by the ballet school’s admissions panel, is charged with nuances of shame, pride and confused good intentions. In this world, happy endings are not impossible, but they’re also not unequivocal. ‘If you go out to find life, you lose other things,’ Mrs. Wilkinson tells Billy, and, like the movie at its best, her words are no less true for being platitudinous.”

12:30 P.M. (Style) BIG FISH (2003) Albert Finney plays Edward Bloom, a traveling salesman from Alabama who has spent a lifetime embellishing the truth (Ewan McGregor is his younger self) in this fantasy from Tim Burton. Billy Crudup is Edward’s estranged son, Will, a reporter in Paris who has been summoned home for a deathbed reconciliation, during which Edward elaborates on his biography. Edward’s doctor asks, wouldn’t Will prefer to believe that on the day of his birth his father was subduing a legendary catfish rather than selling household gadgets in Wichita, Kan.? “The movie insists that the only possible answer is yes, and thus chooses maudlin moonshine over engagement with the difficulties of real life, which is exactly the choice Edward has made,” Mr. Scott wrote in The Times. In “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” (2012), at 8 p.m. on Showtime, Mr. McGregor plays Dr. Alfred Jones, a British fisheries expert asked to evaluate the vision of a sheik (Amr Waked) intent on creating a recreational fishing paradise in a Middle Eastern desert. Emily Blunt is the sheik’s assistant and the object of Alfred’s unspoken affection in this romantic comedy from Lasse Hallstrom. Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, called the film “the cinematic equivalent of turning salt into sugar.”

8 P.M. (NBC) DATELINE NBC In a “Wild, #WildWeb” edition, Chris Hansen investigates the people behind online classified ads who are trying to bilk strangers. His subjects include a teenager posing as a 35-year-old single mother in search of love with an older man; a “problem eliminator” whose advertisement suggests that he is a hit man; college students claiming to be vampires in need of blood donors; and a woman who offered her child for adoption on Craigslist.

1 A.M. (13) THEATER TALK In a “Season’s End Critics’ Panel,” Ben Brantley of The Times, Peter Marks of The Washington Post and Joan Rivers (yes, Joan Rivers) of The Beverly Hills Courier discuss the highs and lows of “Lucky Guy,” “The Nance,” “Pippin,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Matilda the Musical,” “Kinky Boots” and “I’ll Eat You Last.” They also reveal the Broadway shows that made them fall in love with the theater. KATHRYN SHATTUCK